He separated the numbers for the energy sector from everything non-energy, and what he found is downright scary:

Exports of non-energy goods have been on a downward swing for more than a decade, and hit an all-time low in the latest StatsCan report. As recently as 2006, we were selling more non-energy goods than we were buying, but that changed during the Great Recession and it hasn’t changed back.

Economists say that’s OK, because the U.S. is recovering, and we can expect a jump in exports to pick up the slack from consumers. But uh oh, this long-awaited “great rotation” to exports isn’t happening.

“Better U.S. growth is expected to boost non-energy exports and start narrowing this deficit, but we’re not there yet,” Porter writes.

Then there are long-term problems. Bringing back the manufacturing capacity Canada has lost in recent years can’t be done overnight. The lower loonie “will help, but it won’t do miracles,” Desjardins economist Jimmy Jean said recently. That’s because Canada is now competing with developing economies for export-led jobs in manufacturing.

"The global manufacturing industry is more competitive than the 1990s, when Canadian factories benefited from a weakening dollar and the new North American Free Trade Agreement, which helped push manufacturing’s share of the economy to near the highest levels since the 1950s,” Bloomberg noted in a recent report on Ontario manufacturing.

So where Canada’s economic growth will come from in the months and years to come is a pretty tough question to answer. We can hope the housing market somehow, miraculously, keeps booming forever and consumer demand just keeps growing. But with weak income growth and massive energy bills facing consumers, that's unlikely.

And then we can hope for an even lower loonie, which is apparently what Porter is doing. “Maybe it’s not weak enough yet,” he mused.